(Newser)
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Carl Bernstein can't quite believe how the US media mostly ignored what he sees as a bombshell story: As his Watergate partner Bob Woodward revealed earlier this month, Rupert Murdoch tried to get David Petreaus to run for president last year, promising to bankroll his campaign and give him the full support of Fox News. Network chief Roger Ailes was even going to run the campaign. It's all on tape, and yet the Post ran the story in its style section, a crazy underplay that set the tone for coverage elsewhere that followed, writes Bernstein in the Guardian.

"The Murdoch story—his corruption of essential democratic institutions on both sides of the Atlantic—is one of the most important and far-reaching political/cultural stories of the past 30 years," he writes. The tape of Petraeus talking to an emissary sent by Ailes "is an amazing document, a testament to the willingness of Murdoch and the wily genius he hired to create Fox News to run roughshod over the American civic and political landscape without regard to even the traditional niceties or pretenses of journalistic independence and honesty." This should be the end of Murdoch, but the media and political establishments don't seem to grasp its importance. Read the full column here.

Nooooo, the owner of FOX News trying to sway the media and voters of America? Everyone with a brain figured this out a long time ago.

BillGalluccio

Dec 21, 2012 9:40 AM CST

I don't see the issue. This whole concept of buying elections is absurd. The reality is people are stupid. You can spend all the money in the world, but if people are willing to look past the headline and actually pay attention it won't matter. How about instead of blaming him, we blame all the people who go out and vote down a party line for no other reason than they saw a TV ad. Everything our elected figures do is online. It isn't very hard to find. You can go and see how your representatives voted on every bill that was brought up to a vote. The problem is people are too lazy, and too uneducated on political process to do this. Instead everybody just sits here and blames somebody else for the election results. Maybe if we stop voting based on negative attack ads and people start voting based on their own personal beliefs we can have change. Instead we have people going to the polls, voting for people who they have never heard of, solely because of the letter next to their name. That isn't democracy, that is stupidity. It is exactly what both sides want. They get to stay in power while we get screwed. We need to take responsibility for our political process. We can't just sit here, not pay attention and expect things to get better. We need to hold our leaders accountable for how they vote. Take the recent NDAA for example. Last year, it was pushed through with billions of dollars of pork, and gave the government the ability to detain US citizens forever, without filing charges, or giving them legal representation. This year, an amendment was added to restore these basic tenets of our Bill of Rights, then later removed by a committee. Instead of voting out every member who voted in favor of this, most Senators were re-elected. The fact that we don't hold our elected officials to their sworn oath to uphold the Constitution is the reason we are in such a mess. Until we start doing that, nothing will ever change.